I'd been coming up with every excuse in the book to put off taking my 15 1/2-year-old to the DMV so he could take his permit test. Last week, the excuse well ran dry.

My final desperate act was to pull strings with my contacts at the DMV. I had the facts sent to me straight from Sacramento: 43 percent of the people who come in to take the permit test for the first time do not pass, and 47 percent don't pass the second time they take it. That seemed to me to be reason enough to study for another month. Or two. Or six.

My son was unimpressed with my facts, figures or my imagined clout. So I made the appointment online, and he counted down the days to the date like a kid waiting for Christmas.

As the day approached, I realized that my growing apprehension did not stem from the fact that I would be spending an action-packed afternoon at the local Department of Motor Vehicles. My anxiety was coming from the knowledge that I might walk out of the DMV with another teenage driver in the house who had been given official government sanction to drive my beloved vehicle. Even worse, six months from the day he gets that permit, he will drag me back to the DMV to get his license. And then I will get to grow a handful of gray hair every time he drives off by himself into the evening air.

D-Day: Within minutes of our arrival, we were given a nifty automated number ticket and told to take a seat among the already seated sea of humanity at the DMV. It wasn't long before the automated robo-woman voice called out our number. Unfortunately, I had brought everything that we were supposed to bring. We showed the clerk his birth certificate, we had Form DL44 already filled out with my signature and my husband's, and we had his proof of completion from the classroom driver training class.

I forked over $26 and the kid, blessed with my husband's good eyes, passed the vision test with flying colors.

I was then instructed to return to my seat while they fingerprinted and photographed my second-born. I couldn't help thinking of the several thousand dollars I had obviously wasted on orthodontia as he gave an unsmiling glare to the DMV camera.

As he was taking the written test, I watched those exiting the testing area. Perhaps it was just a bad day at the DMV, but it seemed to me that a lot more than 43 percent of the people coming out of the exam area were leaving with their heads hung awfully low. As they walked by, they stuffed their tests -- which appeared to be heavily marked with red ink -- into their pockets and made a beeline for the exit.

Then I looked up to see my son coming toward me with the same cool, somber face he'd been wearing when he went in to take the test. Hope fluttered in my heart. Perhaps there would not be another teen driver in my house that day after all.

"So, Mom," he said. "Are you driving home, or am I?" And so it begins....

Michelle Groh-Gordy is the owner of InterActive! Traffic School Online atwww.trafficinteractive.com , and writes a syndicated weekly column on driving for the publications of the Los Angeles Newspaper Group.